31st March 2009 Archive

After Monday's roll-out of Intel's long-awaited Xeon 5500 family, The Reg sat down with a pair of Intel honchos at the company's Santa Clara, California, headquarters and asked, "What took you so long?"

Dell, HP and Lenovo have all seen their eco-friendliness scores slashed in the latest edition of Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics, which conversely saw Apple and Philips gain notable mentions from the environmental organisation.

The Pirate Bay has unveiled a feature that makes it easy for web users to post links to pirated material on their Facebook page. The activity risks passing liability for copyright infringement onto Facebook, a technology lawyer warned.

Laser printers have been nudged out of the personal, one-per-desk market by the continued growth of inkjets. For straight black print, though, there’s nothing to touch laser copy, and Canon has fortified its entry-level mono laser range with the i-Sensys LBP3100, a small machine with a couple of interesting design tweaks.

Readers concerned for the safety of El Reg operatives, who will this week selflessly risk life and limb by entering Central London during the G20 summit, should rest assured that measures have been taken to mitigate the threat posed to national security and world order by malodorous, dreadlocked crusties deploying packs of dogs on string.

The EU parliament has reached an agreement on the details of the new regulatory body envisioned - and considerably diluted - by Viviane Reding, which should now come into existence in the next couple of months.

The ultimate demotion of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, from grim-faced scourge of individual liberty to national joke, came one step closer last night with the launch of Playboy TV’s Jacqui Smith VIP package.

"It's not another Mickey Mouse course," insists tutor Jon Hickman, of Birmingham City University, talking about his new MA degree course in "social media". The £4,400 course starts in September. "People are going to think we're doing an MA in blogging or Lolcats."

The Israeli armed forces have announced plans to double their existing force of robot bulldozers, after unmanned "Black Thunder" droid diggers apparently covered themselves with glory during the recent Gaza incursion.

Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka has bemoaned an increasingly petty US-Russian spat in which politics apparently threaten the brotherly co-operation which has hitherto marked life aboard the International Space Station.

In our story headlined Big Brother - the price of self-driving cars, we incorrectly reported that Simon Davies of Privacy International gave documents on the Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure Scheme to The Guardian. We would like to make it clear that Simon Davies did not provide any documents to the paper. The Guardian managed to obtain the documents themselves. We apologise for our confusion.

Providers of one of the more popular tethering apps for Google's Android-based G1 handset have had their application summarily dumped from the application store, at the apparent behest of mobile operator T-Mobile.

Microsoft is running into a buzzsaw of bad PR over $11m (£7.7m) in US economic-stimulus funds that Washington state officials have earmarked for a bridge over a highway that would connect two branches of its Redmond intergalactic nerve center.

For reasons that Sun Microsystems has yet to explain, late last week the company decided to pull its briefings on Galaxy servers based on Intel's new Xeon 5500 (née Nehalem EP), and focus instead on how Solaris 10 is being tuned for the new chip.

Little more than a year after its debut, Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales has announced the death of Wikia Search, the for-profit operation he once billed as an antidote to the "unhealthy" search practices of Microsoft, Yahoo!, and, yes, Google.